“Beliefs empower people. According to Nietzsche, people believe certain ideas because they help people live and get around in the world, but he wonders why these helpful ideas must be called True. For Nietzsche, other adjectives are just as informative as to why we hold these beliefs, for example, beautiful, necessary, life preserving. What is being added by saying a belief is True? To say that a belief is useful or necessary places the locus of these adjectives within me. The beliefs are useful or necessary to me. To say that a belief is True is to place the locus outside of the person and onto the 'real world.' Thus, the Truth of a belief has nothing to do with the psychology of the individual. One looks outward to the 'objective,''real world' to adjudicate differences. Again, by pretending that the Truth of beliefs originates from the world external to humans, the beliefs' alignments with these 'objective facts' confer power to them and by extension to the humans who hold them.”

Explore more quotes:


About the author

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.